1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention relate to the field of image processing, and more specifically, to filter architecture for image processing.
2. Description of Related Art
Image processing has many important applications in multimedia communication, machine vision, pattern recognition, and artificial intelligence. In a typical application, an image or a cinematic sequence of images is processed in a processing chain including pre-processing, segmentation, and high level interpretation. The pre-processing phase tends to be context independent and includes operations to enhance the image or to reduce the amount of data for subsequent stages. One such common operation is the filtering operation.
Existing techniques for image filtering have a number of drawbacks. First, the processing speed is not fast enough to process images at or near real-time speed. Second, they tend to be inflexible and may not accommodate various filter sizes. Third, there is little programmability support to configure parameters for the filtering operation. Fourth, there is lack of support for integration with other elements in a typical image processor.